Karl Marx City

“Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s unsettling new documentary, is a smart, highly personal addition to the growing syllabus of distressingly relevant cautionary political tales” – A.O. Scott NY Times

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it left behind tons of unanswered questions, among them filmmaker Petra Epperlein’s suspicion that her father (a suicide) spied for the Stasi, the East German state police.

She and co-filmmaker Michael Tucker (GUNNER PALACE) return to her childhood hometown, Chemnitz (aka “Karl Marx Stadt”), and investigate her father’s Communist past, his association with the Stasi, and the Orwellian apparatus of state control which defined East Germany for more than 40 years. This was a nation in which one out of three citizens spied on the other two. Shot in an evocative black and white suggesting the Cold War paranoia of 1950s’ spy thrillers and narrated by the filmmakers’ daughter Matilda, this boldly stylish film is a potent reminder that politics is personal, and the personal is always political.(US/Germany / 2016 / Directed by Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker)
ur / 89 mins.